I preordered SimCity half a year before it came out. In those months, the internet was divided between those who recognized the numerous game-ruining problems it appeared to be compromised of, and those who didn’t care, or were too ignorant to be aware of them.

I know my story is one of hundreds of thousands of others with the same one. This article has been written a thousand times and has made it to every corner of the internet; even to mainstream news channels have heard it in some form of its many variations.

The afternoon it arrived, the entirety of my will was focused on SimCity. For half an hour, I installed the game, for an hour I downloaded the out-of-the-box update, and for four hours I connected to the first server. I felt like destroying the game entirely, disk and all. I began building my first city. I’m not ashamed to admit I was having a blast. The game crashed. Half an hour later, when I could get back on, and I reloaded the save, but the city was gone. I started a new city.

In itself, the game is a mess; traffic problems, resource glitches, unintentionally limited city sizes, DRM.

My second city had some order; I had figured out how to build effectively with the intuitive road tools. The game crashed.

Reboot a ten year old game, give it a slick UI, focus on deep gameplay, actual tracking of simulated entities working together to create a real, unfiltered embodiment of a city. It should have worked.

By now, you might be confused. The title of this article is ‘a defense’ of SimCity, isn’t it? Furthermore, the problems are fixed, right? Righ—no.

My third city was more or less the same as my second was and my fourth would be. My fifth would have to wait until tomorrow.

Today, a month after SimCIty was released; I’ve played the game thoroughly. In that time, I’ve had trouble forming any opinion about it at all. I love the design when it works; I hate the designers when it fails. This statement seems wishy-washy and weak. But, as a whole, it’s impossible to have a singular succinct opinion about the game, because it is the product of a great developer who was stymied through no fault of their own.

I&#Array;m not sure I agree with this...

Oh great, you say, another EA hate message.

That’s exactly what this is. If you came to this article out of curiosity, and found that you’ve already read the story before, proceeded only in hope of more bashing of SimCity, I invite you to leave, you’ve had your fun. Or, better yet, stay, I haven’t yet said what this whole article’s about.

But first, SimCity. If you force me to concede an opinion. Its long-term development must have been incredibly good. I would love to have seen the developers as they brainstormed the infographic design. I can imagine the delight of the truly inspired engineers and programmers when they first saw the little workers as they came to build the city’s first house or when they saw the tiny moving trucks as the house was filled. The game’s simplicity (actually having images of people on your screen actually being little people on your screen) led to the complexity inherent in a real, city. It is beautiful.

Now, you tell me that the game is incredibly buggy, not only because of the DRM, but for hundreds of other reasons: oversights in development, bad design decisions, etc. Well, Maxis created this game, and EA showed up forcing them to implement DRM (an always online connection) into it. I contend this brute over-lording is responsible not only for the major flaw of the game, the DRM itself, but all of the other smaller ones, because the designers were forced to cut down on polish before the game shipped and focus on larger bugs once it did.

I’m saying it’s EA’s fault. This is old news, but the message lies ahead. We can change the game industry’s path merely by force of will. All we have to do is know something is wrong with the way it is now, and hope we can fix it. Do you think nothing is wrong? Are you happy with the last game you paid for? Many, if not most, would say yes. But, imagine if Leonardo Da Vinci was forced to paint under a pointed stick just as Maxis is crippled by EA’s forced direction. Mona Lisa couldn’t have been painted with a price tag affixed.

I’m all for supply-side economics, just not here, not in the art world. It’s already happened to Hollywood, don’t let it happen to games too.

Do you agree? Disagree? Found a flaw in my logic? Am I an idiot? What's the meaning of life? Your keyboard is right there.